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      Nikki Haley Vows to Fight On Against Trump After New Hampshire Loss

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      Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Tuesday defied calls to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination, vowing to fight on after a second straight defeat at the hands of former President Donald J. Trump.In rousing remarks, Ms. Haley looked ahead to the coming primary contest in South Carolina, where she is lagging far behind Mr. Trump in polls despite a home-state advantage.“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over,” Ms. Haley said, adding, “We’re going home to South Carolina.”Borrowing signature lines from her stump speeches, Ms. Haley noted how far she had come since the race first opened, when she was polling at just over 2 percent, declaring herself “a fighter.”“And I’m scrappy. And now we’re the last ones standing next to Donald Trump,” she added.Ms. Haley also turned up the heat on Mr. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican race who is fighting 91 felony charges, criticizing him as equally bad for the country as another four years of President Biden. She also took another dig at Mr. Trump’s mental fitness and his 77 years of age.“With Donald Trump you have one bout of chaos after another,” she said. “This court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment. You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.”In her final Granite State appearances before polls closed, Ms. Haley had rejected claims that Republican voters had already solidly united behind the former president, and pledged not to end her bid no matter the result.“I didn’t get here because of luck,” she said at a polling site in Hampton, N.H., while flanked by supporters, including Gov. Chris Sununu, her top surrogate in the state. “I got here because I outworked and outsmarted all the rest of those fellas. So I’m running against Donald Trump, and I’m not going to talk about an obituary.”Mr. Trump, speaking to supporters at his victory party, mocked Ms. Haley for speaking “like she won.” But “she didn’t win — she lost,” he added.On Wednesday morning, Ms. Haley is expected to speak during a Republican State Committee meeting in the Virgin Islands, which holds its contest on Feb. 8. She is then anticipated at a homecoming rally in Charleston, S.C.A number of people close to Ms. Haley are encouraging her to keep going, many who are deeply opposed to Mr. Trump’s becoming the nominee again.Betsy Ankney, her campaign manager, released a memo early Tuesday morning shooting down suggestions that Mr. Trump’s path to the nomination was inevitable. She pointed to the 11 of the 16 states that vote on Super Tuesday that have “open or semi-open primaries” that can include independent voters and are “fertile ground for Nikki.”Nevada will host a Republican caucus on Feb. 8, but Ms. Haley is not competing in that contest, instead participating in a Republican primary in the state two days earlier that awards no delegates.Her campaign has bought over $1 million in television advertising from Tuesday through Feb. 6, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.And officials at her allied super PAC, Stand for America, said they, too, planned to forge ahead.Mark Harris, the lead strategist for the PAC, said it was prepping television, mail and digital advertising in a get-out-the-vote effort that would look similar to the programs it took on in Iowa and New Hampshire, though as of Tuesday it had not yet made those investments.“We’re running the outsider candidacy, so this was never going to happen all magically in one day, and so we’re going to keep pushing ahead,” Mr. Harris said.Since the summer, Ms. Haley has predicted that the Republican nominating contest would result in a showdown between herself and Mr. Trump in her home state. Her outward confidence in that scenario has not faltered — not after she failed to place second in Iowa, not after her top rival for No. 2, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, dropped out and endorsed Mr. Trump, not after a slate of South Carolina legislators this week joined Mr. Trump on the stump in the final days of the New Hampshire race.Her message to his allies and the news media: She has been here before.“I won South Carolina twice as governor,” she told reporters Friday at a retro diner in Amherst. “I think I know what favorable territory is in South Carolina.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Did No One Tell Ron DeSantis That Trump Was Running, Too?

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      Despite the early enthusiasm for his policies and political persona in various corners of the conservative media, it was easy to see from the start that Ron DeSantis would not — and clearly does not — have the juice to defeat or supplant Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary.Part of this was the Florida governor’s soft skills or rather lack thereof. He is not a people person. He does not excel at the task of retail politics. He is not, to put it gently, strong on the stump, and he has a bad habit of speaking in the esoteric and jargon-filled language of online conservatives.Consider his first major performance in Iowa last year, in front of an audience of likely Republican caucusgoers. “We say very clearly in the state of Florida that we will fight the woke in the Legislature,” DeSantis said, as he tried to rouse the crowd to applause. “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the businesses, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”There is a relatively small group of people for whom this is a resonant message. For everyone else, it is basically static. It doesn’t speak to the animating concerns of the blue-collar voters who will make or break a campaign in the Republican primary. DeSantis’s inability to craft a compelling message, however, may not have been fatal to his campaign if he had been able to distance or distinguish himself from Trump in any meaningful way. The opportunities were there. DeSantis could have used the multiple criminal indictments against the former president to make the practical case that Trump would not win if he was in jail.But DeSantis chose to run as Trump’s heir apparent and treated him as though he wasn’t actually in the race. He could not turn on the former president without undermining the premise of his own campaign. And so DeSantis sat silent or even defended Trump against legal accountability for his actions in office. “Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” DeSantis wrote on the website formerly known as Twitter after Trump was charged with four felony counts by a federal grand jury in connection with his effort to overturn the 2020 election. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”To the extent that DeSantis tried to differentiate himself from the former president, it was by running to Trump’s political right. The Florida governor in this view would be a more competent Trump — the Trump who gets things done. It was a good pitch for the conservative intellectuals who wanted to support a Trump-like figure without embracing Trump himself. But it was a terrible pitch to the Republican electorate, which did not nominate Trump in 2016 — or turn out in 2020 — because of Trump’s ability to clear a checklist of agenda items.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Memo Ahead of New Hampshire: ‘We Aren’t Going Anywhere’

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      Nikki Haley’s campaign has a message for all those who are declaring her presidential candidacy all but over should she lose in New Hampshire to Donald J. Trump on Tuesday. “We aren’t going anywhere,” wrote Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, in a memo about the path forward for Ms. Haley, which was provided first to The New York Times.In the memo, Ms. Ankney described how Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, outlasted all the other candidates for her one-on-one shot at Mr. Trump and would not be dissuaded from fighting on, even if “members of Congress, the press, and many of the weak-kneed fellas who ran for president are giving up and giving in.”Read the documentIn a memo, Nikki Haley’s campaign manager wrote that “We aren’t going anywhere.”Read DocumentThe memo reads as something of a direct response to the Trump campaign’s ongoing efforts to make her departure from the race feel inevitable, if not immediate.Ms. Haley herself, in an appearance on Tuesday on Fox News, said she was staying in regardless of the outcome.“No, I don’t get out if I lose today,” Ms. Haley said. “Again, I’m going to say this, we’ve had 56,000 people vote for Donald Trump, and you’re going to say that’s what the country wants? That’s not what the country wants.”In the memo, Ms. Ankney attempted to push back on the argument, as she put it, that “New Hampshire is ‘the best it’s going to get’ for Nikki due to independents and unaffiliated voters being able to vote in the Republican primary.”After New Hampshire, where voting is underway, the next major collision for the two candidates would be in South Carolina in a month, on Feb. 24, after a tiny battle for delegates in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Feb. 8.Ms. Ankney noted that in South Carolina there is no party registration, meaning anyone who does not vote in the Democratic primary on Feb. 3 could vote in the Republican one later in the month. More significantly, she pointed out that 11 of the 16 states that vote on Super Tuesday have “open or semi-open primaries” that can include independent voters and are “fertile ground for Nikki.”“Until then, everyone should take a deep breath,” Ms. Ankney wrote. “The campaign has not even begun in any of these states yet. No ads have been aired and candidates aren’t hustling on the ground. A month in politics is a lifetime. We’re watching democracy in action. We’re letting the people have a voice. That’s how this is supposed to work.”Ms Ankney cited Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and Vermont as Super Tuesday states with “favorable demographics,” and noted that Michigan, which votes after South Carolina, is also an open-primary state.“After Super Tuesday, we will have a very good picture of where this race stands,” she wrote.Of course, all campaigns say they are pushing on — until they aren’t. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had scheduled an event in New Hampshire on Sunday that he only canceled after withdrawing from the race in a video recorded in Florida.Ms. Haley has scheduled a number of fund-raisers in the coming weeks in California, Florida, New York and Texas, and has already booked a $4 million television buy in South Carolina.Mr. Trump’s campaign has been ratcheting up the pressure on Ms. Haley to exit the race if she has a poor showing.The Trump campaign’s top two advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, put out a memo on Sunday, after Mr. DeSantis ended his campaign, arguing that Ms. Haley “must win New Hampshire” in order to remain viable.If she remains in the race through her home state of South Carolina, they warned, she would be “absolutely DEMOLISHED and EMBARRASSED,” using capital letters for emphasis.Ms. Ankney appeared to respond in her missive, using her own capitals to make one final point about the choice for the G.O.P.: “DO REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN?”“See y’all in South Carolina,” the memo ends. More

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      What’s a Never-Trump Conservative to Do?

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      David French and Jillian Weinberger and Donald Trump is expected to win decisively in New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday. For Republican voters who don’t want Trump as their nominee, what alternatives exist?In this audio interview, the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, talks with Opinion columnist David French about how a probable Trump nomination will “cement a significant change in two directions with the G.O.P.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York TimesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger with help from Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud with engineering support from Isaac Jones. Original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Source photograph by juliaf/Getty Images. More

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      Primarias en Nuevo Hampshire: lo que hay que saber

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      Este martes se celebran las primeras elecciones primarias del país. Están en juego 11 delegados republicanos. Los demócratas no concederán delegados.Los votantes de Nuevo Hampshire acudirán a las urnas el martes para participar en las primeras elecciones primarias del país, en las que Nikki Haley espera hacer mella en la ventaja de delegados del expresidente Donald Trump tras su gran victoria en el caucus de Iowa. La votación en el estado comienza técnicamente a medianoche, pero la gran mayoría de centros electorales abrirán a las 7:00 a. m., hora del Este.Esto es lo que hay que saber:¿Cuándo son las primarias de Nuevo Hampshire?Las primarias de este año están previstas para el martes 23 de enero.¿Por qué Nuevo Hampshire va de primero?La respuesta simple es porque así lo dicta la ley: una ley estatal aprobada en 1975 establece que las elecciones deben celebrarse allí al menos una semana antes de las primarias de cualquier otro estado.La tradición electoral del llamado “estado de granito” existía mucho antes de que se aprobara la ley. La primera vez que una votación del país se realizó primero en ese estado tuvo lugar en 1920, cuando 16.195 republicanos y 7103 demócratas acudieron a las urnas el 9 de marzo.Desde entonces, el estado se ha aferrado a esta tradición. Ser el primero tiene sus ventajas: cada cuatro años, el foco político trae consigo una afluencia de dinero, medios de comunicación y atención de otros lugares a este pequeño estado con baja densidad de población.¿Cómo funcionan las primarias de Nuevo Hampshire?El martes, los votantes de Nuevo Hampshire se dirigirán a los centros electorales de su pueblo o ciudad para votar por quien quieren que sea el candidato presidencial demócrata o republicano.Las papeletas se tabularán mediante máquinas de recuento de votos. Los trabajadores electorales leerán y contarán a mano los votos por escrito, como los del presidente Biden, quien no aparecerá en las papeletas demócratas. El Partido Demócrata cambió su calendario de primarias, desplazando a Nuevo Hampshire del primer puesto en favor de Carolina del Sur, pero Nuevo Hampshire se negó a cambiar su fecha y de todos modos celebrará primarias demócratas. Biden se negó a participar, por lo que sus partidarios han montado una campaña por escrito en su nombre, pero no se concederán delegados.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Judge Judy Hits Campaign Trail for Nikki Haley

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      While former President Donald J. Trump enlists several former rivals to help him deliver a closing argument to New Hampshire primary voters, Nikki Haley, his last remaining Republican opponent, has approached a different kind of bench: Judge Judy.Television’s best known judge, whose real name is Judith Sheindlin, waded into the race on Sunday when she campaigned for Ms. Haley at rally in Exeter, N.H., albeit minus her trademark gavel and robe.It was a rare foray into presidential politics for Ms. Sheindlin, who told CNN on Sunday that Ms. Haley had made a strong impression on her.She pointed out that she was not supporting Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, simply because she was a woman.“I would support her if she were a frog,” said Ms. Sheindlin, who supported Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in his unsuccessful run in the 2020 Democratic primary.Ms. Sheindlin avoided attacking Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, but she said he had too many distractions with his criminal and civil cases to focus on governing.The television star argued that Mr. Trump and President Biden’s ages were catching up with them and that “they wouldn’t know a Houthi from a salami,” referring to the Iranian-backed militia in power in Yemen and a deli meat.She said that even she — at 81, the same age as Mr. Biden — hasn’t been able to turn back time.“I need a nap in the afternoon,” said Ms. Sheindlin. “So does Joe Biden, probably two.” More

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      Trump’s Campaign of Humiliation Against Ron DeSantis

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      The former president’s brutal, yearlong campaign of humiliation helped torpedo the Florida governor’s White House hopes and left his next moves in politics uncertain.Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.Now he is both defeated and debased. His departure from the race on Sunday was a far fall from grace after opening his campaign as the heir apparent in a Trumpified Republican Party. Rehabilitating that reputation as he considers his next political move will require plenty of repair work with donors and Republican voters, thanks to Mr. Trump’s ruthless parade of insults over 242 days on the campaign trail.“I don’t care if he’s a Republican,” Mr. Trump said of his belittlement of Mr. DeSantis at a November gathering of the Republican Party of Florida — the governor’s home turf. “We hit him hard, and now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the skies.”But even more crushing was Mr. DeSantis’s response, or lack thereof.After releasing a campaign video in 2022 that made him out to be a political fighter sent from the heavens, he appeared either unwilling or unable to swing back at Mr. Trump or go on the attack. Even Mr. Trump’s aides were surprised that the DeSantis campaign did not go harder at the former president on issues where he might be vulnerable with conservatives, like abortion.And the prickly nature of Mr. DeSantis’s personality, which could manifest itself in an awkward mix of detachment, moodiness and facial tics, amounted to an irresistible target for Mr. Trump, who seemed to relish bullying Mr. DeSantis as if he were stuffing a freshman in a high school locker.Still, Mr. DeSantis remains popular in his home state, and beyond Florida he’s viewed relatively favorably. As a presidential candidate, he needed to succeed where every Republican before him had failed: prying loyal Trump supporters away from the former president without alienating them.Staff members from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign gathered on Sunday at a restaurant in Manchester, N.H., hours after he suspended his bid for president.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMr. Trump has long trampled over the boundaries of generally accepted political behavior, relentlessly pushing the racist “birther” lie about President Barack Obama and urging supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign hit new levels of cruelty against a fellow Republican.The missives were often led by Mr. Trump’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, who leaned into his background as a public relations operative for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal slams with the force of the sport’s suffocating guillotine chokehold.In November, Mr. Cheung told The Wall Street Journal that in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he’s never felt before in his life.”In a news release, he cast doubt on Mr. DeSantis’s masculinity, saying that he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time.”Mr. Cheung also referred to the Florida governor as a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why Mr. DeSantis would “cuck himself” in front of the entire country — sexual slang that implies weakness in a man — and accused him of searching for “new sugar daddies” to fund his campaign. He called Mr. DeSantis a “disloyal dog.”Mr. DeSantis fought back with a more traditional approach.His campaign rolled out a “Trump Accident Tracker” in a daily email to the news media that highlighted Mr. Trump’s missteps on the trail. He criticized Mr. Trump’s “juvenile insults,” saying voters did not like them. (The eruption of laughter inside Trump rallies suggested otherwise.)Mr. DeSantis eventually tried to up his game.Responding to accusations that he wore lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller, Mr. DeSantis questioned Mr. Trump’s manhood.“If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis said.The line did not seem to land. Mr. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Mr. Trump, he is “not an entertainer.”At the same time, pro-Trump online influencers formed a troll army pumping out content like videos showing a man with Mr. DeSantis’s face being kicked in the groin. In comparison, Mr. DeSantis’s online operation proved haplessly inept.The differing approaches stemmed, in part, from a fixation on Mr. DeSantis inside Trump headquarters, where animosity for the governor ran high.Not only was Mr. Trump incensed by what he viewed as a striking lack of loyalty from Mr. DeSantis, but the Trump campaign also includes former DeSantis campaign aides who had been fired or felt otherwise mistreated by the Florida governor, including Susie Wiles, one of the former president’s closest confidantes. Many still had axes to grind.“Bye, bye,” Ms. Wiles posted on Sunday on social media about her erstwhile boss, who had tried to blackball her from Republican politics.The quick endorsement from Mr. DeSantis on Sunday may help salve some of those wounds. Hours later, Mr. Trump vowed that he would retire the “DeSanctimonious” nickname, and his allies began posting messages welcoming Mr. DeSantis back into the Trump fold.But aides said that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis had still not talked.Asked about whether the two men could repair their relationship, Mr. Cheung held his fire.“We’re focused on New Hampshire,” he said.Ken Bensinger More